At Gousto, it’s been a year of extreme growth, but also a year of industry-wide challenges. Despite this, equality and diversity across the business remain of the utmost importance.

As we grow, staying focused on building a culture of inclusivity is essential. Having just published this year’s gender pay gap report, we know there are always more improvements to be made, but we’re proud to have made a considerable improvement.

We’re dedicated to continuing to refresh our processes and introduce new ways of working that enable us to make improvements across the company and create a more diverse and inclusive workforce.

What is the gender pay gap?

This is the average difference between pay for men and women, regardless of their roles and seniority. It is different to equal pay which ensures men and women employed in the same roles receive equal pay.

What does this mean at Gousto?

Gousto’s 2020 median pay gap was 10.2%, an improvement of 56% versus 2019, which stood at 23.2%. Our ultimate goal is to have no gap, but we’re proud to be making progress and we know that there are still improvements to be made.

2020 was a very strong year for Gousto, with sales up 129% and our first full year profit. We also doubled our workforce and became a tech Unicorn valued at over $1bn. To date, we are delivering over 8 million monthly meals to UK households.

We’re well on our way to achieving our mission of becoming the UK’s most-loved way to eat dinner, but we are determined to grow responsibly, without losing sight of the things that matter.

There are privileges that business growth allows us, such as better rewarding employees for their contribution to the business, helping them to develop and enhance their skills, and bringing in amazing new talent to the team.

However, there are also challenges that come with being one of the UK’s fastest-growing tech businesses. One of these challenges is that more men than women are studying technology subjects at higher education – which naturally flows through to recruitment and these positions attract higher salaries.

What have we done to improve this?

• Welcomed two new women to the Gousto Board, meaning 43% of our Board is now female, above the 34.3% of FTSE 350 board positions that are held by women, as of January 2021.
• Appointed our first Inclusion, Diversity and Belonging Lead to drive this agenda across Gousto.
• Invested in a technology platform to remove gender biased language in job adverts, ensuring they are more accessible and inclusive.
• Delivered Beat Bias through Active Allyship sessions, to support our key hiring managers in learning how to beat gender bias in the workplace. To beat bias in reward structures, we have partnered with Willis Towers Watson to roll out reward benchmarking across our business.
• Enhanced our maternity benefits to support eligible new parents and those returning to work post maternity leave
• Recently introducing new flexible working policies; Flexitime and Work Where It Works. These policies allow an enhanced level of flexibility and choice for each individual, recognising that there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to flexible working.

But we won’t stop there. Over the next year we’re committed to;

• Launch an Employee Network Group dedicated to females, bringing together different backgrounds and experiences to strengthen belonging and provide a different lens to contribute to our ID&B work.
• Hiring a Head of Reward to lead and review all reward programmes across the company.
• Continue to analyse and challenge each of our people policies to ensure barriers are removed in regards to talent management, progression, benefits and reward.
• Build external hiring partnerships to attract more females for Leadership, Tech and Operations positions.
• Review our hiring processes and continue to provide training for managers to minimise bias throughout the hiring process.
• Continue to regularly review how we work at Gousto post-pandemic and provide more family friendly working opportunities.

This remains a top priority of ours and we call on the tech industry to take stronger action to reduce these inequalities. We’re aware that the impact of the pandemic will be an ongoing industry challenge when striving to reduce the gender pay gap, however it is our mission at Gousto to make real progress on this each year.

Gender pay gap

Gender bonus gap

Proportion of employees receiving 2020 bonus

Pay quartiles (proportion of males and females in each pay quartile)